I recently stumbled upon a video on YouTube about adding various upgrades/addons to an Xbox 360. Among these upgrades included the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive. Since HD-DVD lost the format war against Blu-Ray back in 2008, it is considered a dead format and likely any movies on the platform are cheaper than their Blu-Ray counterpart. That's when I had the thought to purchase this drive and some HD-DVDs to expand my HD movie collection. Because the drive communicates over USB, it can be used with a PC and you can either play the discs directly or rip them to play them on your media server. I went to eBay and found a 46 movie lot with two HD-DVD drives for $60 which is a huge discount on movies.

I am now in the process of converting these movies with MakeMKV and AnyDVD HD/Clown BD. Most of the discs I've tried have worked with MakeMKV, but a few might need a different approach. I've been able to rip most of my library so far without issue, but some of the Warner Brothers titles are more difficult to rip due to their impending disc rot. Luckily, I was able to rip "A Clockwork Orange", "I am Legend", and "Constantine" so far and there doesn't appear to be any disc rot on these. I have about 10-15 more Warner Brothers titles to assess, but hopefully I can get through most of them. Disc rot is inevitable on Warner Brothers HD-DVDs so if you have any of these still, get them backed up ASAP!

I will be looking for single movies or smaller lots that don't contain Warner Brothers movies in the future. However, even if only 20-30 movies out of the 46 are good in this lot, it still is a heck of a deal on all of the movies.

I've upgraded and nearly completely rebuilt my HTPC for better long term usability and more moderate gaming. I swapped out the motherboard with an HP Elite 8300 motherboard, upgraded the RAM to 16GB, upgraded the CPU to an i7 3770, upgraded the SSD to 240GB, upgraded the hard drive to 4TB, and upgraded the GPU to a GTX 1050 Ti.

Originally, the upgrades were inspired by high CPU usage when playing H.265 content from Plex. I noticed this when playing back 4K H.265 content from Plex on my i5 2500. With the i7 3770, I am able to play back 4K H.265 movies with roughly 30-40% CPU usage. Adding a GTX 1050 Ti also helped with the decoding via its CUDA cores. The GT 1030 simply didn't have the power to help with H.265 so everything was CPU bound. I needed to swap motherboards because the HP 6200 Pro doesn't supply the needed 75W for the GTX 1050 Ti. Since I was swapping motherboards, I went for the HP Elite 8300 so I could get Ivy Bridge CPU support. Naturally, I needed to get the best i7 available. The larger SSD was just so I could install a couple of higher demanding games such as Rise of the Tomb Raider and Just Cause 3. I outfitted the rig with a 4TB drive to accommodate installing more Steam games and support recording TV shows/movies from Plex DVR.

As a result of these upgrades, the only thing original to the PC I first bought is the chassis. Now, I am happily using this machine as a more moderate gaming machine and my home theater workhorse. I will likely upgrade the low profile GPU as needed in the future, but the GTX 1050 Ti should suit me for a while.